About

In addition to photography, Creative Nepal is proud to host a collection of autobiographical stories written by variously identified Nepali people about their sexuality, gender identities, lives, and social contexts. In 2013, Chad Frisbie, a writing instructor from New York, funded a project through Kickstarter to come to Nepal and lead writing workshops for gay, lesbian, and transgender Nepalis. The goal was to help them learn nonfiction-writing skills and tell “their story” in public forums and through a print publication that showcases their words. The writers were free to choose any narrative from their lives that they felt would be most important for audiences in Nepal and elsewhere to hear. Chad worked with the new authors over several months of brainstorming, drafting, and editing. Writing in English, the authors built upon their English language skills and studied rhetorical and creative writing techniques which some adapted into their stories. While the project’s parameters are both geographical and identity-based—sexual and gender minorities currently living in Kathmandu—the collection brings enormously varied lived experiences into one book. Each story stands alone yet also contributes to an open-ended narrative mosaic that does not attempt to encapsulate sexual and gender minority experience definitively. As editors, we experience this collection much like overhearing a group of twelve people discussing their lives in the same comfortable room, wherein overlaps, contrasts, and synergies arise through the organic patterns of engaged, intimate conversation.

The stories were published in a printed anthology titled Pride Climbing Higher, which Creative Nepal hosts on this website. In 2015, the stories were translated and printed in Nepali with support from the Kathmandu-based arts journal, La.Lit, and the Norwegian Embassy in Nepal. Creative Nepal hopes to host new stories from new authors in the future – feel free to contact us with ideas or material.

You can read the introduction to the anthology and more about the process here.

All of the stories from the Anthology are available here in English and Nepali.